Nanny for the Billionaire Single Dad (Small Town Grumpy Billionaire Daddies #2)

1. Chapter 1

Mara

The GPS says turn left. I turn left. The GPS is a liar.

Day one of the job. Rainy October. The road turns from cracked asphalt to mud in about thirty feet. My rental hatchback starts sliding before I can react.

I correct. Overcorrect. The back end fishtails wide, and then there's a crunch I feel in my back teeth as the bumper kisses something solid and metal and very, very expensive.

The car dies. Just stops. Like it's embarrassed for me.

I sit there with both hands still white-knuckling the wheel, rain hammering the windshield, staring at what I've just hit. It isn't a regular gate. It's custom ironwork, black, with some kind of leaf pattern worked into the bars. The sort of thing that runs more than my last apartment did.

Naturally, that's what I sideswiped.

I push the door open into the drizzle. My boot sinks into mud up to the ankle and makes a deeply offensive noise when I pull it free. The gate has a scratch. My bumper has a dent. Blocking the entire entrance to what is clearly a very private, very expensive property, is my very dead car.

I take inventory the way I always take inventory. One scratch. One dent. One dead engine. One first impression, already ruined. I file each item like I'm building a case, because building the case is the only thing that ever steadies my hands.

"Hello?" I wave at the intercom panel mounted to the stone post like it can personally fix this. "Sorry, my car just died, and if you could buzz me through I can get out of your..."

The gate buzzes. Then swings open.

A black SUV idles on the other side. Headlights cut through the gray like two cold eyes. It was already there. It was waiting.

The driver's door opens.

He unfolds from the vehicle slowly. No hurry.

No urgency. Like urgency is for people who don't own the road they're standing on.

Tall. That registers first. Then the coat, dark wool, the kind that hangs right because the shoulders underneath it are built to hold it there.

Cashmere, probably. I know cashmere when I see it. I just don't usually see it on people.

My brain does something unhelpful.

His jaw is sharp. His hands, when they come out of his pockets, are large and unhurried.

He moves like a man who has never been in anyone's way because the world reroutes around him instead.

The rain doesn't bother him. He doesn't hunch against it.

He stands in it. Like weather is other people's problem.

I notice all of this before I can stop myself. I don't want to notice it. I notice it anyway.

He takes in the scene. My car, his gate, the scratch on the iron. His expression doesn't shift. Not angry. Not alarmed. The face of someone who's already decided how this ends and just hasn't told me yet. I am apparently the problem being decided about.

His eyes do come back to me. One pass, top to bottom. Not appreciative. Not the kind of look I would call a look. He's cataloguing. The mud on my boot. The wet hair stuck to my cheek. The blazer I left Boston in seven hours ago.

Then he goes back up.

His eyes make the return trip a half-second slower than the first one. He catches himself and stops, jaw tightening. Looks away at the gate. Like the gate just said something interesting.

I feel that. I file it somewhere I shouldn't.

From the backseat, a face appears at the window. A boy. Eight years old, one palm pressed flat to the glass. He's watching me with his whole body, not just his eyes. The kind of attention a kid pays when something is happening that adults haven't told him how to categorize yet.

I look at him. I can't help it. There's a quality to how still he holds himself against that glass that makes me stop.

He sees me looking.

His hand lifts. A slow, careful wave. Not shy. Not automatic either, the quick flutter kids give to strangers on instinct. This one is deliberate. Considered. Like he thought about it first and decided yes. Like he's been practicing it.

My chest tightens, a small pull just under my ribs.

I don't wave back. Not yet. I just look at him, this small person pressed to a rain-streaked window, and I think about what it takes for an eight-year-old to decide that a stranger in the mud is worth a wave. The calculation in it. The hope in it.

Then I think about how I am not here for hope. I am here for six months and a paycheck and enough distance from Washington D.C. that my name stops showing up in search alerts.

I look away first.

The man has covered the distance between us without me noticing.

That's the second unsettling thing about him.

He moves and the space just changes. No announcement.

He stops a few feet from me. Looks at my car.

Looks at his gate. Looks at me. Up and down.

Not flirtatious. The way you look at a cracked wall to figure out how structural the damage is.

"You hit my gate."

His voice is low. The kind of low that doesn't need to be loud.

"Your gate jumped out at me."

His eyes move to my face and stay there. Dark. Impossible to read.

I notice he's closer than he was a second ago. I don't know when he stepped in. I just know that the small distance he closed is now a distance I'm aware of.

"This is a private road."

"I know that now." I hold up my phone, rain already spotting the screen. "I'm trying to find the Grayson property on Mill Ridge Road. Which is where I'm supposed to be. The GPS took me down the wrong fork, and the county hasn't updated their maps since the Obama administration, and..."

"Who sent you."

Not a question. A deactivation. Like he just reached over and turned the volume down.

I blink. "I'm sorry?"

"Who. Sent. You." He takes one slow step forward, close enough that I have to make myself not step back. "Because if you're press..."

"I'm not press." I pull myself up straight. This puts me at approximately his collarbone. Fantastic. "I'm the nanny."

His jaw eases, just barely. Not warmth. Not relief. A recalibration. Like he just ran a calculation and got a different number than he expected.

He looks at my car again. The mud on my boot. Then back at me. Unimpressed.

"The agency sent confirmation this morning. Mara Ellison." I pull up the email and shove the phone toward him. "There's a contract, it's in my bag..."

"I know what the contract says."

"Great. So, if you could let me push through. Or if someone could help me push, because the engine won't..."

"You hit my gate."

"We have covered that."

"With a rental."

"Also covered."

A muscle moves in his jaw. Barely. He pulls out his phone, makes a call.

Two sentences, low and clipped, like a language designed for efficiency.

He slides the phone back into his coat without looking at me.

Handled. Or being handled, which isn't the same thing.

I bite back what I want to say about that.

The drizzle picks up. A cold rivulet runs down the back of my neck and I refuse to shudder in front of this man. He notices. I can tell because his eyes flick to my collar and away again, the smallest movement.

Then his coat does something. Not a full move. A suggestion of one. His right shoulder drops a quarter-inch the way shoulders do when a hand is about to go to a lapel. His chin shifts slightly down. The whole line of him bends, almost imperceptibly, toward what would be a shrug-and-offer.

He goes still. The shoulder comes back up. His hand stays in his pocket.

He chooses not to.

I watch him make the choice. I watch him decide against it and lock the decision down and return to exactly the posture he had before, like the almost never happened. My pulse does something I am not going to examine.

I am, weirdly, glad he didn't. I do not want to be a woman wearing this man's coat four minutes into a job. I do not want to owe him the warmth. I do not want to have to hand it back. But I felt it happen. That's the thing I can't unfeel.

Past him, past the SUV, past the open gate, I see the house for the first time. At the end of a long gravel drive, barely visible through the trees. Stone and dark timber, old in a way that isn't falling apart.

The property keeps going past it too, far past it, sloping back into woods that look like they belong to someone for as far as the eye can follow them. There's no neighbor visible. There won't be one for a while.

It's beautiful. I don't want it to be beautiful.

"The agency described you as experienced," he says.

"I am experienced."

"They said professional."

"I am professional. This is a weather event and a map error and a minor..."

"You're blocking my gate with a dead car." He tilts his head. Just slightly. Just enough. "In the rain. Four minutes into the job."

"Three. The gate is your property, so the time on the gate counts toward..."

"Stop talking."

I stop. We stare at each other. Rain fills the silence. I won't flinch. I've been through worse than a man in an expensive coat deciding I'm a problem he didn't plan for.

From inside the SUV, small and clear: "Dad. She looks nice."

His mouth parts, just slightly, like he means to answer and thinks better of it. He reaches into his coat and produces a business card. His knuckle grazes mine when he hands it over. Briefer than a touch. Not nothing. I take it without looking. COLE GRAYSON. No title. Just a number.

"My assistant will handle the car and the rental company," he says. "And the damage to your bumper."

"I can call the rental company myself."

He stops. Looks back at me.

"It's faster if I..."

"I said I can call them."

We look at each other. He doesn't argue. He doesn't agree, either. He just lets the silence sit there, the way a man does when he's used to people filling it for him. I don't fill it.

He turns back to the SUV. Conversation over.

"So, I'm not fired?" I call after him.

He stops. Doesn't turn around.

"You're not fired." Flat. Quiet. "But understand something." He glances back over his shoulder, jaw set. "My son is not a job you walk away from when it gets hard. If you're the kind of person who leaves when things get complicated..."

He doesn't finish. He doesn't need to. The SUV door closes.

I stand there for a second, business card in my hand, mud on my boot, then trudge back toward my dead rental to grab the suitcase before whoever he just called shows up.

Through the rear window of the SUV, the boy is watching me.

Not the careful wave this time. Just watching.

Eight years old and so quiet it tightens that same place under my ribs again, sharper this time, because now I've seen his face and I know the wave was real and I know the quiet after it is real too.

He's checking. He's waiting to see if I'll do it back now that his father can't see.

His hand comes up again. Same motion. Slow and deliberate, one small palm against the glass. Asking the same question he asked two minutes ago with the same patience of someone who has learned that wanting something doesn't always mean getting it.

I wave back.

His face splits open. A grin so wide I can see it through the rain on the glass, unguarded and total, the kind of happy that hasn't learned yet to protect itself.

Then his father says something I can't hear, and the boy turns to answer him, and the moment closes like it was never there.

I stand in the mud and feel it anyway.

I drag the suitcase out of the trunk and look up at the long gravel drive disappearing into the trees. Whatever this job is, it isn't the job the agency described.

I came here because I needed to disappear for a while. A house in the woods. A single father who wanted privacy. A child who needed someone steady.

I did not come here to be looked at by a man like that. And I did not come here to wave back at a little boy practicing how to be brave.

I pick up the suitcase and start walking.